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Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Feminism Acknowledges The Problem Of Feminine Entitlement And Emotional Bullying . . . When It Comes To Other Women!

Just wanted to point this out, once again over at the other Sex Nerd, Emily Nagoski's blog.

The question is bullying, specifically female bullies. She starts, astonishingly enough, with this radical observation about early female social behavior:

Boiled down to nothing, the dynamics among girls are such that it’s not okay to tell someone you’re angry with them or hurt by them, because then you’re “in a fight,” and the other girl will rope in friends to side against you, she’ll escalate your offences in order to maintain those friends’ alliance, and they’ll use that alliance to isolate and stigmatize you.

Eventually one of you will apologize, and whoever apologizes “loses.” They capitulated.
It’s a zero-sum world where only one person is allowed to be hurt at a time, and usually that person is the one with greater social capital.

The alpha girls (“queen bees”) of this scenario are characteristically uninterested in taking responsibility for another person’s hurt feelings, insisting that that person is “too sensitive” or has blown everything out of proportion. She feels entitled to take revenge when someone hurts her, but judges and shames anyone who attempts revenge on her or even tries to communicate with her that she hurt them.

In other words, she is TERRIBLE at hearing that her behavior made someone feel bad, and she has the social capital to punish the other person for saying anything.

So, what can we learn from this? Besides little girls are vicious?

Quite a lot, actually. I mean, this isn't exactly new data, but it's nice to be acknowledged not just by a noted sex researcher, but by a noted feminist. And while Emily goes into quite compelling detail about how this behavior affects groups of girls, she doesn't say anything about how this type of thing manifests itself in male-female relationships.

So when you are a young man in a relationship with a woman -- say, a nascent feminist girlfriend during your freshman year of college -- and your social interactions go beyond flirtation and into the beginnings of a relationship, note the type of trap that you can fall into:

YOUNG WOMAN: I want a (Beta) male who will be sensitive, care and share his feelings with me. So, tell me how you really feel about me and our relationship, so I can feel that you are honest and have feelings for me.

YOUNG MAN: Okay, I feel dominated and emasculated by your pushiness, disliked and unwelcomed by your friends and frankly put-off by your general sense of entitlement. I only put up with your constant bossiness and snap judgements because you're hot and put out, but if you took the sex out of the relationship then mostly I feel like I'm your personal emotional punching bag, status symbol and errand boy, not a respected and valued person in my own right.

YOUNG WOMAN: What?! I made you feel bad? YOU BASTARD! What the hell is wrong with you? Why the hell did you have to pick a fight like that?

YOUNG MAN: Huh? But I thought you wanted to know how I felt?

YOUNG WOMAN: Of course I do! But you're not supposed to say I make you feel bad!

YOUNG MAN: But . . . But you do make me feel bad. I thought you wanted me to be honest about my feelings?

YOUNG WOMAN: That's not being honest -- that's you being a whiny little bitch! God, my roommates were right about you -- you're just a tool, aren't you? Just like every other guy. This is just like what happened on Valentine's Day!

YOUNG MAN: What was wrong with Valentine's Day? I spent a fortune, we had a great time!

YOUNG WOMAN: How could you NOT know what you did wrong on Valentine's Day!? Don't you ever listen? Are you just stupid? Why do I always end up with the stupid ones?

YOUNG MAN: I . . . uh . . . please . . . um . . .

YOUNG WOMAN: You just said that to make me feel like shit -- and that fucks up my whole week. You KNOW I have an exam next week, and now that you've made me feel like shit I'll probably flunk it. Thanks, you asshole. Oh, just wait until Karen and Amy hear what you did! Amy said you'd pull some bullshit like this -- she never liked you.

YOUNG MAN: I . . . um . . . what did I . . . ?

YOUNG WOMAN: Look, don't make it worse -- you already made me feel like complete shit about myself. How dare you? Don't you know what kind of stress I'm under? Do you know how bad you've made me feel? Look, just get the hell out, and don't come by for a few days. How could you say those mean things to me?

YOUNG MAN: But . . . what about how you make me feel? Can we talk about that?

YOUNG WOMAN: YOU ASSHOLE! Why? To give you another shot at emotionally ambushing me? I can't take this kind of abuse. Karen was right about you. Just get the fuck out, okay? And don't bother calling for a while. I'm mad at you. And terribly, terribly hurt.

YOUNG MAN: But don't you . . . don't you have anything to say . . . about how. . . ?

YOUNG WOMAN: GET OUT! What kind of whiny faggot are you, anyway? I hurt your feelings? WAH! How come I always get stuck with the overly sensitive emo types? Jesus, you make me ill. Okay, sure, maybe you take some of the shit I say the wrong way. But that doesn't give you the right to trash me like that. All right? You're such an emotional fucking basket case you probably don't understand that, but let me use small words: Get. The Fuck Over. It. Jesus, are you actually Gay? That would explain so much . . .

YOUNG WOMAN (who sees an apology as victory): Oh, shut up and buy me some ice cream. And if you ever fucking try that shit again, I will fucking bury you, understand?

YOUNG MAN: Uh, sure. No problem.

See the issue? When young women feel entitled to make each other feel like shit, making dudes feel like shit just comes naturally -- and we have virtually no defense against it. Not at that age, and not under the influence of the Blue Pill.

(The above was a paraphrased summary of an actual argument I remember overhearing recently at a major university. No, really. I couldn't make this shit up.)

(NB: For a Red Pill Version of this dialog, I'd say it would go something like this:

YOUNG WOMAN: I want a (Beta) male who will be sensitive, care and share his feelings with me. So, tell me how you really feel about me and our relationship, so I can feel that you are honest and have feelings for me.

YOUNG MAN: So am I. Hey, what's the story on Amy? Is she seeing anyone?

YOUNG WOMAN: You're not being-- Why do you want to know about Amy?

YOUNG MAN: Because if you don't stop trying to convince me I have a vagina, I'm going to need a new girlfriend. And Amy's always said that if I got tired of you, she might be interested in going out.

YOUNG WOMAN (who has been negged, dreaded and subjected to preselection with one sentence at this point): Look, I'm sorry, forget I brought it up. It would just be nice if you, y'know, told me how you felt sometimes.

YOUNG MAN: I think I just did. And now I'm feeling horny. Shall we explore our feelings?

You get the idea.)

Emily goes on to examine this behavior in a little more detail, including an analysis to determine just what can be done to prevent girls from emotionally beating up other girls (beating up on guys is apparently not a problem). She frames it in terms of figuring out why the female bully just isn't listening and comes up with 1) because being told they're a bitch makes them feel bad, and 2) apologizing is seen as capitulation and failure to women. Which trains every little girl in the West to see every apology she ever gets as a sign of her victory and success, even if an apology was unwarranted. And that helps convert them into perfect little entitlement princesses.

But then she gets to a third reason. Perhaps it will sound familiar to those who have been frequent visitors of the Manosphere:

3. For some people it genuinely does not compute, this notion that you’re NOT actually allowed to do anything you want. Especially when you’re popular. “I’m allowed to do what I want and if she doesn’t like it, she can suck on it,” is what feels fundamentally true to the alpha girl.

At last. They admit it. Girls have an unrealistic sense of entitlement. She's speaking of "alpha girls", of course, but the fact is that in a female social hierarchy, the entire point is for every girl to establish her place as close to the "queen bee" as possible. Every girl there feels entitled to position, rank, and perks for no other reason than she's a special little snowflake who's been told that she can do anything and she deserves everything. And if someone hurts her feelings, then the proper response is to demand an apology and act out until she gets one, or causes such a big problem by an emotional outburst as to shame and embarrass the offending party.

What Emily doesn't admit, or even mention (probably because she's talking about the important stuff, the relationships between girls, not the trivial stuff, how they treat boys) is that when a young woman enters in a relationship with a young man, regardless of her social standing in the female hierarchy, after the flirtation and infatuation phases, more often than not the young woman in the relationship assumes the role of "queen bee" in regards to her boyfriend and treats him as a female social subordinate in their emotional dealings.

And Blue Pill dudes just have little idea how to react to that apart from utter capitulation. Princess asks a baited question. Dude walks right into it, thinking he should actually believe her when she says she values honesty and wants to know how she really feels. Princess melts down, any criticisms turned back around on him, with counter-claims of emotional distress. Dude panics at the emotional display, seeks to appease unhappy Princess with whatever she wants. Dude apologizes, signalling (to her) that she has social dominance over him (as opposed to masculine culture, where a well-delivered apology actually can enhance the social position of the apologizer). Princess triumphantly offers a shit-test to reward Blue Pill Dude for his temerity to actually have hurt feelings and his weakness in apologizing with contempt. Blue Pill Dude fails shit test, capitulates, and drives Princess to Starbucks to listen to bad live music and publicly display his submission to her.

So when your feminist girlfriend told you she wanted a sensitive dude who shared his feelings, she meant only your POSITIVE feelings about her, no negative ones. Because in a relationship with a Queen Bee (and every girl in our culture seems to feel entitled to be the Queen Bee, so this is true regardless of the woman in question's social status -- even a low-status late-blooming girlfriend with her first college boyfriend) any negative feelings you have about her and express are essentially the same thing as physically assaulting her and starting an argument, in Girlspeak.

So when she says she wants to know what your feeling . . . she's lying. And she expects you to lie, too. And goddess help you if you don't.

Emily admits she doesn't know how to counter this,

I don’t know how to do this. But if you’re a person who has believed that you’re allowed to do what you like and it’s not your fault if it hurts people, understand that there are rules about what is okay or not in a fight

And then she enumerates a few common-sense things like "no name calling" and "no ultimatums", completely ignoring the fact that girls almost always abandon "civilized" rules of engagement when they fight. Indeed, she points out how devious and quick to violate rules of standard, civilized behavior they are in the first paragraph. Yet these devious, conniving young ladies who are utterly entitled and irresponsible towards each other are supposed to adhere to a strong code of conduct when "fighting" with each other?

She doesn't say. But she does end with something powerful and important. For the first time in my memory, a self-proclaimed feminist has agreed and essentially endorsed the entire premise behind the Red Pill:

The social rules you learned in school or from your parents are not necessarily the ones that will serve you well in life. If you cling to those old rules because they are familiar, you will be trapped in the same pattern of relationships you’ve always experienced. If you are satisfied and content with those relationships, okay. If you would like to improve your relationships, it’s time to find some new rules to follow.

Emphasis mine. Of course, she's discussing the need for new rules of conduct between women, she's not addressing the issues between the genders.

But if the social rules I learned in school and from my parents included a strong dose of feminism, the idea that men and women share an "equal" role in leading and guiding a relationship with the male always displaying deference to the female? If I see feminism conspiring to trap me (or my entire generation) into a destructive and dysfunctional pattern of relationships? If this pattern has led to a spiral of self-loathing, hypergamy, and misandry for the men in our culture, do we not all have a stake in changing this pattern?

Men, in aggregate, have seen their masculinity constantly under attack from feminism for four decades. Consider this in light of the above observations about female social posturing and relational dynamics. If feminism is the metaphorical "queen bee", and "she" feels "under attack" because we're complaining that they're making us feel bad, then what is the traditional, natural feminine response?

1) Feminism is uninterested in taking responsibility for what it has made us feel (that is, male views of ourselves and of women) because, like a Queen Bee girl bully, any complaints or criticisms are dismissed as our bad reaction to "losing male privilege", because as Men our expressed pain and suffering undermines the feminist contention that all men are a privileged class of oppressors and that women are their innocent victims. In Girlspeak, if men feel bad about themselves then instead of that being an important piece of emotional communication, it's viewed as an excuse to punish us for making them feel bad that they made us feel bad. It's our fault that we feel bad, in other words, and they want to punish us for it, not take ownership of it. Better to call us a bunch of crybabies than to own up to their responsibilities for our current culture. It's a classic emotion dismissing framework.

2) Feminism is telling Men that we are being "too sensitive" when we complain, usually by pointing out the millennia of suffering Women had to endure while Men walked the earth with god-like power and authority oppressing Women with their penises and their Patriarchy -- so whaddya whining about? Feminist contention that MRAs and other advocates for masculinity who voice grievances with Women, in aggregate, are merely personally bitter and scarred from their experiences and are not representative of a wider cultural problem (In other words, these angry, often divorced men are being "too sensitive" about lives ruined with hypergamy and gender-based social injustice, because it's still SO much better to be a boy than a girl in our culture) is a common tactic used when a feminist is forced into a corner and held to account. The "too sensitive" response is doubly effective on men, too. With women, it's basically an invocation of shaming based on a woman being too Beta. But with men being "too sensitive" is almost always intended to shame and emasculate.

3) Feminism feels entitled to take revenge on Men for what they have done (made women feel bad about feminism's assault on masculinity, among a laundry list of other crimes). Despite proclamations that feminism is an ideology of equality, from the beginning it has exclusively been women's rights, not equal rights, that has motivated feminists to action and feminism to an academic pursuit. When one aspect of womanhood perceives itself under attack, the first instinct is to "gather allies" by expanding the frame of the issue to include all women, therefore making a single and distinct issue part of a large attack on femininity by "the Patriarchy". Once mobilized, collective womanhood has no compunctions about "taking revenge" far in excess of the original issue, and gains support from non-feminist women by invoking a mutual distrust of All Men -- male-punishing custody and divorce laws, for instance, and the pro-divorce hypergamy impulse. ("That's right, honey, leave his ass and take half if you aren't happy! He owes you! Serves those filthy men right!"). Women who try to take a stand against a consensus of sisterhood are included in the ostracization and revenge. Just like a Queen Bee girl bully does to the spunky nerdy chick who tries to stand up for what's right.

4) Feminism judges and shames anyone it sees as having tried to "hurt" feminism by daring to have hurt feelings attributed in origin to Feminism And any attempts to try to hold Feminism accountable for its actions (male or female) is condemned with shaming language and harsh judgements and withering criticism calling into question every aspect of the critic's life without addressing the thrust of their arguments. If someone tries to publicly call feminist ideology to account for, say, the high number of single-parent households in America, then they are shamed for being anti-progressive sexists atavists who haven't come out of the 19th century . . . not compassionate, concerned citizens of the 21st century who observe a problem and propose that maybe -- just maybe -- the fact that half a generation grew up actively estranged from a strong paternal, masculine influence just might have something to do with the sad state of our nation's youth. Indeed any attempt to hold femininity to account for its share in the problem is seen as an attack and grounds for harshest judgement. Shaming and judgement are two powerful feminine tools, and under feminism they've been thoroughly weaponized.

In short . . . feminism is TERRIBLE at hearing its behavior made someone feel bad. And since it has enormous social capital left over from the 60s and 70s, it doesn't hesitate to strike back viciously at any critics. Feminism treats Men, in aggregate, like the usual girl bully Queen Bee does anyone she sees as a threat.

That's not Emily's point -- Emily's point is that girl bullies don't have any compelling reason to change their poor behavior, even though they should, because they're impacting the self-esteem of other girls and hurting their feelings, and hurting the feelings of girls is, of course, always wrong. But my point is that feminism has traditionally displayed the same poor socialization in its manifestations as the very worst sort of girl-bullying, particularly in regards to men.

The reason she's focusing on the interaction between girls is, as you said, that it naturally drifts over to their relationships with men. Changing the way women relate to their own gender would change the way they relate to everyone, change their culture, put some social responsibility on them and obviously benefit men. It's not because what women do to men is "less important".

Only women react and interact with each other completely differently than they do with men (see my posts on the Female Social Matrix for details).

And I can't help but note that in 40 years of feminism, female bullying is only seen as a problem to be discussed when it impacts other girls, not when it affects the boys who get brutally blind-sided by the complexities of adolescent female society with regularity. In all that time feminism hasn't done jack squat when it comes to injecting girls with a sense of social responsibility -- quite the contrary. Feminism has (whether intended or not) instead given girls a sense of privilege and undeserved entitlement that has helped erode intergender relations to their present deplorable state.